Can you really call a character a “hero” once they’ve yelled “Give me your face!”? on their enemy before they deal with Ed Gein? Ask about Optimus Prime.
The leader of the Autobots definitely started out as a good robot in Michael Bay’s 2007 live-action film transformers. A common complaint against this film’s Optimus Prime is that he took the Autobot-Decepticon war to the streets of Mission City and risked countless lives in his quest to find the almighty All Spark. But that decision was actually made by Josh Duhamel’s Captain Lennox, and as soon as Optimus got to the scene, he tried to get the All Spark and take the fight away from the humans. He even offered to sacrifice his life and fuse with the All Spark to destroy it – that’s hero behavior right there.
In space no one can hear you scream – but that doesn’t stop a bad guy from trying. This week, Polygon celebrates all forms of sci-fi villains because someone has to (or else).
And yet… even then there were some worrying things about Optimus Prime’s behavior.
For one, he allowed Bumblebee to be captured by Sector 7 and sacrificed him to a shadowy, torture-loving government organization because he didn’t want to risk losing the All Spark. And when OP learns of the death of his comrade Jazz who was torn in half from Megatron, his reaction was little more than “Oh no! Anyway…” You can try to excuse this by saying that Optimus has been waging a war that can desensitize humans and robots alike. The problem, however, is that Optimus, a longtime veteran of the bloody oily war for Cybertron, is always in war mode. And that makes some of the things he did in the live-action movies essentially war crimes.
In the sequel from 2009 revenge of the fallen, The Autobots team up with humans to hunt down any remaining Decepticons on Earth, such as Demolisher, whom Prime executes with a point-blank headshot after He was already disabled and posed no danger. That had to be against some sort of Geneva robot convention on prisoners of war.
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Throughout the film, Optimus only seems concerned with killing Decepticons, perhaps to go out in a glow of glory after the All Spark is lost, and thereby seize any chance he has to save Cybertron. And halfway through the movie, he gets his wish and dies at Megatron’s hands.
later in revenge of the fallen, Optimus is brought back to life with the Matrix of Leadership. Resurrections are often a delicate matter. Sometimes when things come back…they come back wrong. Add to that the fact that Optimus Prime was then upgraded with parts of the Decepticon Jetfire (which supposedly switched sides, but still did) and suddenly the scene where Optimus does all the delicacies on the face of the fallen, the original Decepticon, a lot makes more sense.
Optimus would continue down this dark path in the 2011 follow-up The dark side of the moon, where he is betrayed by his mentor, Sentinel Prime, causing something inside him to shatter. In the same film, he allows the Decepticons to stage an attack on Chicago that kills 1,300 people to prove that Decepticons are a threat to Earth. Sentinel actually accused Optimus of not making that a priority needs of the many over the needs of the few (cute since it was voiced by The Wrath of the Khanby Leonard Nimoy). But it’s Optimus who was the real Number Cruncher of Doom in the film, deciding that over a thousand innocent deaths was an acceptable sacrifice to save the rest of humanity. However, one has to wonder how much that factored into his decision to slaughter his enemies again…
In fact, while leading a counterattack on Chicago, Optimus doesn’t deliver an inspirational speech like “Let’s save the earth” or “Let’s honor the sacrifice of those lost here,” but rather says, “We’ll kill them all.” Although that’s not entirely true , because Optimus doesn’t “kill” Megatron in the movie. He performs a Mortal Kombat Deathfall on him, ripping off his head and spine.
As with any film, more and more of the little good that was left in Optimus Prime was chipped away until it was consumed. One of the biggest blows to his soul was the 2014 film Age of Annihilation, where humans kill several Autobots and Optimus witnesses Stanley Tucci’s character melt the corpses of his friends into metal to create their own Transformers. At that moment, it dawns on Optimus that Transformers will never be fully sentient creatures to humans. You always will be machinery who can be dismembered or, in their view, have their bodies desecrated for profit. His psyche didn’t stand a chance after that.
At the end of the film, Optimus leaves Earth to search for the creators of the Transformers. In the end he finds one, Quintessa, in the fifth part of the series, The Last Knight. The problem is that she turns out to be some kind of ass. A mind – human or robot – can endure a lot: war, seeing the mutilated corpses of your friends, betrayal. But finding out that God exists and is an idiot would be too much for many people to deal with. In the film, Quintessa supposedly “brainwashed” Optimus into becoming the evil Nemesis Prime, but what really happened was more like how the Joker did to Harvey Dent in him The dark knight. All OP got was a little nudge over the edge as he was already dangling over it on his robo-heels.
In the end, Bumblebee helps Prime go back to normal, proving that OP’s case of purple eyes wasn’t really brainwashing, but rather a psychotic episode caused by too much mental trauma, which 100% could happen again. If any, The Last Knight leaves Optimus in an even more fragile state of mind after discovering that Earth, “the only place in the universe whose people let me call it home”, is in fact Unicron, which in the Cybertronian religion is their version of THE DEVIL appears.
Unless Optimus gets professional help, chances are he’ll continue to succumb to his demons on a regular basis until he’s brought to justice in Space Hague. I think that’s why Paramount went on and did it bumblebee instead of dealing with it.
